


The Witching Hour

by SixGunSnowWhite



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Related, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Supernatural Elements, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-14 19:41:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18058799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SixGunSnowWhite/pseuds/SixGunSnowWhite
Summary: Shortly after arriving at Horseshoe Overlook, Arthur explores the East Grizzlies and discovers a mysterious cauldron that leads to a night of passion and premonition.Edited to add a non-con tag as it could be read that way, since drugs and magic are involved.





	The Witching Hour

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in Chapter 2, before visiting the Downes Farm. I wanted to know more about that cauldron Easter Egg and the epilogue brings in Arthurian legend, so… why not add Morgan le Fay? It’s my first fic and probably shows. Any words of encouragement or suggestion are appreciated.

Hunger is the most dangerous pursuer on the trail.

Arthur would rather face a team of bounty hunters than have his judgement dulled by three days’ hard ride with a light kit.The train he means to meet comes from Annesburg and there is a perfect, lonely stretch for an easy robbery, but he forgets about all that when he sees the fat jackrabbit dart in front of his horse. He wheels off the road and tracks the rabbit into the forest, heedless as a fool in a fairy tale.

By the time he gets a clean shot and bloody hands, he realizes he’s gotten himself turned around. Not by much, he assures himself, but he rides slow south and towards the lowering sun. The day burns off the color of fine whiskey between the birches, so bright, he almost misses the real fire set in the thick copse before him.

Keeping his hand over his revolver, he dismounts and walks carefully towards the light and the source of the sharp, sweet smoke beckoning him closer. The hut is really more of a scavenged lean-to, with bright bolts of silk draped over precarious fallen branches, the floor littered with molded-over pelts and stubby candles sprouting like mushrooms around and on top of a makeshift altar. An altar to what, Arthur doesn’t want to know, especially when he feels bones crunch underfoot. The small ones, he can guess at, but the others...

His eyes water as he draws near the fire and the bubbling iron cauldron abandoned above it. No, not entirely abandoned, for a mouldering, ancient raven watches him from its perch in the corner. Strange old bird, to not startle at his approach. Nothing much good happens to the overcurious in a fairy tale, yet Arthur’s stomach twists at the spicy perfume of warm cloves, penny licorice, and sod coming from the pot and his mouth waters, too, and before he knows what he’s doing, his tin mug dips into the murky liquid.

He raises the cup to his lips, shrugs, then drinks it down. The damp earth scent turns sour and metallic on his tongue and he doesn’t even have time to curse his own stupidity before he is falling backwards, away from the cauldron and the cloudy eyes of the raven who, at the last, seems to laugh and laugh at him.

Night came on while he slept, dreamless, and he awakens on an unfamiliar ledge. He sits in the grass for a spell, getting his bearings, checking himself for any obvious damage. He’s got a head full of fog. His limbs are heavy, a bit like drunkenness, but the rest of him feels impossibly alert. To the east, he recognizes the outline of the Three Sisters and a low, full moon; he is quite a ways off from where he found that hut.

In sudden panic, he whistles for his horse and strains to hear its approaching hooves. Instead of those familiar steps, a solitary woman’s voice rises in song from the valley below. He might have missed it were he riding by, and the soft wind did nearly carry it away. He might not have heeded it were he not still so hungry, but he is. It’s a knife’s point pressed into his side, beyond food now, that bigger hunger that forever stalks him everywhere, that drives him always to the next stranger’s call, the next campfire, the next hilltop to explore.

He has to know.

He carefully picks his way down the steep piles of boulders.

Moonstone Pond, he remembers, as he passes underneath the unmistakable scrimshaw outline of scaffolding against the cliff. The profile of the woman sculpted there stares beyond the bounds of the world, as does the hanged corpse of her creator. Arthur treads so close, he hears that loaded noose swing with the breeze, creaking grim time with the woman’s ethereal song. Doubt twinges in his gut before he sees a white beacon flicker in the center of the pond below.

Realizing the dancing ghostlight is in fact a pale woman, he edges closer.

She sings in what he guesses might be Gaelic, picking out a word here and there he remembers Sean using, or maybe it’s because, like Sean, the woman has bright red hair, a thick, dripping rope she wrings out over her bared back. She sways with her lullaby; it must be a lullaby because each note makes a grateful muscle in Arthur’s back unknot, like sinking into the finest, hottest bath in St. Denis.

The face carved in the cliff above could have been hers, for hers is just as perfect and unmoved by his arrival. Bats burst from the ruined eaves of a tree-flattened cabin on the far shore, and she looks over her shoulder at him, sharp as a shootist, and just keeps bathing from her rocky perch.

And singing. Only for him.

Compared to her hair, her skin is all silver and curving blue shadows in the moonlight. The moon itself shatters into a hundred pieces in the water she scoops onto her long neck. She turns towards the shore. Her soaked camisole clings to the pointed tips of her breasts and she uncurls her legs before him like the petals of a ghost orchid.

It’d be the perfect lure for a bushwhacking.

He knows better. Or he should.

Arthur doesn’t know if it’s the lingering effects of the potion, the tendrils of her song, or simply his own aching lust pulling him to her like the needle of a compass. But she washes her bare thighs in tantalizing circles that nearly touch the pool of gathered cotton where those legs meet and he has never been more thirsty in all his life.

Wordlessly, he undresses himself as he approaches, shrugging off his jacket, untucking and unbuttoning his sweat-stained shirt. He smells his body’s ripe rind, more unabashed and animal than man. He pulls off his boots and unbuckles his gun belt at the last before stepping out of his trousers.

The water is a jolt to his skin, but it isn’t much colder than the night. Warmer still, the slice of air between them when he wades to her open legs. Even as she pulls him down to meet her lush mouth, he swears she is still singing to him.

He almost didn’t expect her to be real.

Like bulrush, her spine arches toward him beneath his fanned hands. He rolls the camisole up over her head and slaps it down on the rock behind her. She won’t let his kisses abandon her for that long a time again and so guides his lips to the velvet skin between her breasts, moves his hand down to her thigh. He squeezes, grazes his thumb up and down her slick crack, dips inside with a surprised guffaw. She’s wetter than he ever knew a woman could get.

No virgin’s fumbling to get it in her, nor distrust of his brawler’s frame and the vulgar heft of his cock. She stretches taut around him and he slides in deep, rolling his hips against her eager and smooth.

“You fit like a mink glove,” he breathes.

Even the friendliest whore usually wanted him to take the lead. But this woman crosses her ankles behind the small of his back and squeezes her thighs together. She practically wrestles him onto his back. His hands go to her ass and spreads her wide, fit to split her at the seam. She digs her nails into the meat of his chest. She is fucking him, he realizes, not the other way around.

He wants to beg her to stop before he puts a bastard in her, but as soon as he thinks about filling her swollen pussy, he feels the train rushing down the track.

But he’s stopped plenty of trains in his day.

( _The train! Wasn’t I on my way to rob a train_ , a nagging voice inside asks.)

Focus, he thinks, focus on the notes of her song still ringing in his ears, the fistfuls of her smoke-scented hair he inhales and the delicious sting of fresh scratches. He knows just how he will sketch her face later, if he can do that vulpine look in her eyes justice. But his pencil can never capture the heat of her breath as she pants into his neck. He urges her on and on. Soon she breaks against him in waves, uncontrolled notes of pleasure fly from her throat, and there’s no turning back for him, either.

Liquid fire rushes forth and into her. She wrings him dry of every drop. Let the bastards come, he thinks wildly, let me flood her so she never thirsts again.

She burrows against his entire length, relaxed and quiet, then cups his chin with a shaking hand. Any care dissolves beneath her gaze. The more he looks at her, the further away he feels from anything at all, in fact. He’s a black stone sinking to the bottom of the pond.

“Am I in a dream?”

She kisses him. “Yours or mine?”

“So you do speak.”

Her voice is a different kind of music, no less a snare than her eyes. Only, she whispers into his heart.

Her sorrow spreads in him like a drop of ink in water. She drinks of his joys as he had drank from her cauldron and, now he knew her. How lonely she was. Lonely and old, older than anyone else alive. He’d seen her look before. It was the stalker on the trail, the shining eyes at the firing end of his rifle. Was this pond always hers? Did she call that tree down to flatten the tresspasser’s cabin as easily as she beckoned him down from the road? Was it really another woman’s face sculpted in the cliff overlooking this place, or was the face of every woman who had ever driven a man to despair of desire hers underneath?

She starts to sing again, grinds her hips again.

His shivers are not all borne of desire. He stirs awake beneath her and floats further away from any thought that is not of her. _Never thirst again_. He wants nothing more than to be hers and that isn’t like himself, either.

( _Get in front of the train, you fool_ , his own thought demands, but fainter than before.)

“Stop,” he says through gritted teeth. “Stop.”

She stops kissing the red lines of her handiwork.

“I can’t stay…,” he growls in frustration. “I know.”

She sits up with a sigh. “You’re not really a moonlight lover.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, but he nearly wanted to cry when she rolled her hips off of him. Damp and getting colder, he supposed he looked deflated all over now.

“Well, but you could’ve fooled me,” she says before kissing his forehead.

The music in his head retreats like passing clouds, so much so that he no longer fears looking in her eyes. He rests his palm on her cheek.

“Believe me, darling, I’d enjoy nothing more than your company, but I’ve got a lot of people who counting on me to do my job.”

“You’re all sunshine, fire.” She lays her hands over his and leans into him with closed eyes. “You should be cast in gold.”

As if she had summoned her words, he suddenly warms down to the tips of his toes. If she starts up again, he isn’t sure he has the strength to deny her a second time. She must’ve realized the same thing, because she stops sighing and opens her eyes. She takes his hand from her face and puts it down, gives it a good squeeze first, though.

“You’ve given me something tonight. I will give you something in return.” She deftly turns around on the stone and leans over the water on her hand and knees, giving him a full view of her curved back and the white globes of her ass. He bites his lip. She cocks her head, smirking. “Look into the pond with me.”

“Oh,” he says, disappointed. “Sure.”

He hauls himself up and into a similar position next to her, feeling a sight less graceful about the endeavor. The surface of the pond is still and the moonlight spreads over it like frost. He looks at her reflection in the water. The curtain of her hair makes her face more severe in shadow. He lowers his eyes to the space between her breasts, pangs with the salty aftertaste of her skin.

“Look closer,” she chides.

He clears his throat and looks at himself; but he doesn’t look like much compared to the silver night and the tiny spectres of moths blinking their wings shut amid the fringe of rushes. The face in the cliff floats in the pond, too, looks down her granite nose at them, regal as a queen, and he looks from it to the red-headed woman’s reflection, back again.

Both faces are, old, older than anything else alive, both seeing beyond the bounds of the world. Both peer back at him. He starts to pitch forward into the pond, or he is already, leaning in as if they just asked if they could whisper a secret in his ear. As if he wasn’t losing his mind and he didn’t just see the stone lips part and speak: _Never thirst again_.

“Too close,” the woman beside him says, tugging his arm.

He shakes his head and sits back on his haunches, shaken and shivering. She puts a hands on his shoulder. Her eyes are a blue million miles below his reflection and the water, too.

“Don’t travel down,” she says flatly. “It will cost you everything.”

He frowns. “South, you mean? Blackwater?”

The faraway look passes and she studies him. “There’s a fork in the road.”

She wraps her free arm around his neck and kisses him deep. His hands move along her spine and any further questions from him boil off, water on a hot skillet.

“I’m throwing you back,” she says, wriggling out of his grip. “Releasing you.”

“You calling me a fish?” He pulls her close and nuzzles against her shoulder. “Who says I want to be thrown back?”

“You did, Arthur.“ Between his kisses, she says: “But you can still change your mind. Only, you must choose.”

“A fork in the road.” ( _The train don’t come here_ , the voice reminds him. But then he’d have to leave her all alone.) He holds his lips to her neck.

“My horse,” he cries, remembering, a bit ashamed. “I don’t know where she got to.”

He pries himself off her a bit, but keeps just enough within her eager reach. The way she pets his chest makes him damn near want to purr.

“Don’t worry.” She pleasantly tugs on his hair. “Whistle.”

He does, and perhaps it’s the valley that amplifies his call, or maybe it’s her; the familiar thunder of his horse’s approach.

“Say, how did you know my name?” But his interest is already following his tongue’s slide along her collarbone.

She squeezes his ass and pulls him close. “Just don’t ask for mine.”

He wants to ask her instead to sing again and take away his choice, but the memory of that eerie melody is pounded under hooves. His true lady-love, he thinks, no less fond with the hit of bitterness. Reluctantly, he disentangles and takes in her beauty one last time before his better sense can be overthrown entirely.

He fumbles his trousers and boots back on, hitches the gun belt over his shoulder, and, from the safe distance of the shore, high in his saddle, he tips his hat to her. He rides out of the valley faster than a fever and doesn’t slow until he’s sure he can see a pale line of dawn in the east. He only realizes he left his favorite shirt behind when a very confused postman gives him a perturbed look on the road to Annesburg. Arthur hitches by the side of the road to pull a spare from his saddlebag.

“Best mauling I ever got,” he mutters and smiles as as he buttons up.

Funny, too, how he only just now remembers that he still hasn’t eaten anything in hours.

For once, he wants the safety of other people around him, to not be too alone in his thoughts and what the woman (his lover, he corrects, gets a twinge of arousal just thinking it) had said about him. Hunched over a bowl of Annesburg’s finest pigslop, he vows to give the pond a wide berth as he crisscrosses the plains. What lies there is a luxury he can’t afford right now.

But surely his hunger for her will smoke him out and he will find himself trodding down the footpath to the smashed cabin on the pond’s shore again. It’s only a matter of how long he can go without before starving. But for now, he is full up on thoughts and feelings and witches in heat and no one would believe a goddamned word of it, anyway.

He thinks the next time he visits Moonstone Pond it will be during the day. He will allow himself to lie very bare on the stone slab where she once offered herself. He will pull his hat down over his eyes and not care if anyone can spy him from the road. There’s only one audience he will have in mind and his skin will warm under the sun and his own greedy hands and the weight of ageless, bottomless eyes from the cliffs above. He will lie in wait there until he burns all over or until he hears her voice again, whichever comes first.

He never does catch that train.


End file.
